Slevin's journal

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Slevin
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Slevin's journal

Post by Slevin »

Hey everybody,

I’ve been a reader of this blog now for what I would consider a good while (on the order of about 6 months), and a reader of the forums for a much shorter period of time. I thought the best place to start posting would be here in the journals section.

About me:

I’m 22 years old. Recently graduated college with a B.S. in physics. I would say after college graduation that my mastery level of physics (based off the Dreyfus model) was probably about level 3 (in some cases maybe 3.5). During that time I worked in a spintronics lab, and in the end had my name attached near the front of a few papers. I was decent at the subject, but it didn’t peak my interest enough for me to really want to study it. So around the beginning of this year I decided to get a career instead of pursuing a tertiary degree (as I thought I would have done for most of my life). Its possible I will go back for a tertiary degree (if I don’t have to pay for it), but it would probably be in a different subject like Systems Engineering or data sciences.

Due to some connections in the field, I quickly landed a decent job in the Software Engineering fields. Yearly pay is about 70k. The work I do is about half systems engineering/ systems thinking, and half programming in a multitude of different languages. As far as the job goes it is not terrible, but I have a certain lack of connection/drive to the work. I often find it quite interesting, and programming is something I can get caught up in for a lot of hours.

In terms of FI, I came to the subject probably about the beginning of this calendar year. I have read an enormous amount of work on the subject, and am doing decently in implementing it. I would guess that my proficiency in this field is probably a 3, though I’m working hard to try and push it to a 4 (who knows how long this will actually take).

(In Progress) My web of goals:

Economic:
Spend money only where it is the optimal solution for the situation
Spend money optimally on a solution (when it is spent)
Diversify my income streams into more compartments than job income + investment income
Invest the surplus (right now it seems like stocks are the way to go)

Material:
Don’t own things that are not often used
Maintain the things I own instead of buying new ones often
When buying things: treat price in terms of cost of ownership
Lower my waste as much as possible

Educational:
Always try to apply systems/ holistic thinking/reasoning
Acquire the skills necessary to maintain all of my material goods
Hit proficiency level 3 on at least 2-3 interesting subjects per year
Find a skill interesting enough to dedicate towards working to a level 5 ideal
Balance skills according to the renaissance ideal

Ecological:
Reduce waste as much as possible
Gain enough design skills and practical skill to start improving my local ecological system
Grow a significant portion of my own food intake

Social:
Keep a meaningful relationship with myself and my SO
Become part of several communities with at least a few shared interests

Physical:
Eat healthier, less processed meals
Exercise often
Lift weights several times per week
bike often
hike often
garden often

My ideals for this journal:

Track many of these goals (both FI related and not). There will probably be a heavy emphasis on the financial section of this journal, but that is just due to the simple tangibility of this system compared to many of my other goals listed here.

In the end, I’m not completely sure that my main financial goal is FI in the way that it is presented here and other sites. It is certainly a good goal and a way to make the current economic system work for you, but I don’t know how much I like the current economic system (especially in the US). It is likely I will become an expat and move to a much simpler (and cheaper) country, where I can spend my time working on the things I am interested in. Currently much of that is agriculture and working on solving the issues of low energy and community living (probably somewhat close to a lot of permaculture ideals). In my current lline of work it is also possible that I could live in this situation, work part time, and still accumulate many more resources than I use.

Hopefully this will be a good place to see how my understanding of the world changes over the next few years, and I can re-adjust my goals for them as time goes on.

Measurements:

Initial economic value:

Started working in June with a net worth of around $1500.

Economic value (Sept. 3)
$ 16000.
Vehicle ~= 2000
Bank ~= 10,000
Investments ~= 3000

Gilberto de Piento
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Gilberto de Piento »

Welcome to the forum! You're definitely doing well in the savings department.

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Slevin
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Slevin »

Looks like I haven’t made a journal update in quite a while: here is what’s going on with my life.

On the financial front:

Bank ~= 14700
Investments ~= 6000
Car ~= 2000
Random Stuff I am selling (Tv, extra bike, designer clothing I acquired quite some time ago)~= 500
Total ~= 23k.

Not a bad improvement over the past couple of months.

Thoughts on the job front…

My job has fully turned into a daily grind. My favorite parts have been removed due to lack of “priority”, and I am often left staring at spreadsheets and sitting in meetings all day instead of doing anything useful. I feel like I should go out and start looking for another job where they let me do ANY sort of programming because it would probably be better than this, but the risk-averse side of me is afraid that leaving a company after working there for only 6 months would look bad on my resume and nobody would want to hire me right now anyways.

Things I have spent money on:

Bough a Surly LHT, 2010, for $600. The bike is in good condition, and I’m sure it would sell for nearly the same price if I want to get rid of it at any point. I’m using it less and less as the mornings go below freezing and the weather becomes darker. I am a little bit too much of a wuss for an hour of 6:00 AM biking in the 30 degree weather. Especially with my car only meters away.

Briefly bought a Patagonia Fleece for about $100. I decided it was nice but maybe not that much warmer than the other fleeces I owned and so I promptly returned it.

As an amateur chef who loves to cook I have often been eyeing cooking implements, like knives, pressure cookers, and cast iron or copper pans. I really would like to get an old cast iron pan but I have a hard time justifying spending 30 minutes driving to buy a pan off of somebody on CL. Hopefully soon somebody will post one closer. OTOH in my living situation right now I don’t NEED to buy more pots or pans as my roommates already own some.

Musings on social life and housing:

I have a lot of social anxiety which often makes it difficult for me to talk with others on a deeper level. With the amount of communication I am forced to do at work I am slowly wearing away on this. My attempts at building social circles through online sites like meetup have so far not been too fruitful. I have made several new friends around here though, which is starting to help.

I have also been enthralled with the “Tiny housing” movement that has been going on recently, and this has really tweaked my idea of what an appropriate shelter is. On this subject, I am not sure if a tiny house or an RV is a more appropriate home. RV’s are at best temporary structures with a certain failing point of an engine at 200k-300k miles. They are not exactly cheap and not exactly “homey”. Yes tiny houses are in fact the new trailers, and I feel horrible about building anything new when used options exist, but I still feel like they are the most appropriate solution in terms of having a shelter that is deeply personal, mobile (to be fair much less so than a trailer), and cheap to maintain. Cost is on par with a more recent RV (to be fair why would I buy one of these over an old one). Building your own shelter is also deeply ritualistic, and would allow me to play with the ideas like shown in Christopher Alexander’s “A Pattern Language” (I blame 7Wannabe5 for this current obsession).

In random other news:

I feel like I have learned more valuable information about life in the past 3 months of not being in school just studying on the side for 3 or so hours per day than I did throughout most of my college career. I find this very sad for the amount of money and apparent “effort” spent working throughout college. It definitely shows the disparity in actually caring about something versus being told to care about studying a subject.

The city I live in was just nominated as one of the best “small cities” to live in in the country. Which makes me think that either the data collection used terrible metrics, or the entire US is a very dull and boring suburban area. I could also just plain be missing something. When did life become about shopping malls, housing, and safety? Also when did people start calling 300-400k housing “affordable” by any means?

http://www.bizjournals.com/denver/morni ... n-the.html

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Slevin
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Slevin »

Monthly journal update (I should really update this thing more frequently!).
Dec 5th, 2015

Bank -= 20000 (got an unexpected award at work with a 4k monetary incentive attached)
401k -= 10000
Car -= 2000
Random selling stuff -= 800
Total -= 33000

So now we can look at my (ridiculous) expenses for Nov...
Gas + Car maintenance + insurance = 183.69
Alchohol = 50 (my fancy beer preference is showing through :oops: )
Food = 250 (This is truly ridiculous, even for me. This is mostly due to going out 5 times with gf when I visited or she was in town, which accounted for about 110 of these costs.).
Healthcare = 65
Miscellaneous = 362

Let's see what I think about these costs.

Gas + maintainance + insurance: is getting a little bit out of hand right now. In Nov, I spent around $200 on this combined. In Dec so far, I have spent about 300, and it will probably end up being double this by the time I iron everything else out. I would really like to not have a car these days, but it isn't looking like that is going to happen any time soon. Alternatively, I could spend a ridiculous amount of money on an electric car or something equivalent to that to fulfill this duty. Also I could maybe try to use an electric bike for the 25-30 mile round trip commute. The big issue here is that the roads in the winter get very icy and cold. Icy may be able to be dealt with using the proper tires. The cold and lithium ion batteries don't mix very well, however, which could be problematic.

Alcohol: I'm okay with this cost. I usually pay around $8 or so dollars per glass of beer (these are sours), and drink once or twice per week and share.

Food: As noted above, excess of $100 spent on eating out 5 times. This is way too much, and I need to work on it. $150 for my food for the month is not bad. Not quite to $100 yet, but that is my goal.

Misc expenses: 362. Nearly none of these were reoccurring costs. $210 or so was spent on a pressure cooker. $60 was a court fee that ought to net a much larger return plus the return of these expenses (old landlord did not return deposit in time required, and then made outrageous charges, should be closed quickly). $35 of the rest of this total seems to be fraudulent charges, this is being dealt with currently.

Other notable things this month,
Read/ reading list:
Thoreau - Walden
NNT - Black Swan
Haidt - The Righteous Mind

Currently Reading: NNT - Antifragile, Seneca
Up to bat: Collapse, overshoot, considering moving over to reading textbooks.

Will finish this update post in a follow on after I sleep some more.

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Slevin
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Slevin »

Quick update for The month of December:

Late December was an interesting month from a financial perspective. One of my family members is moving and needed to get rid of their vehicles, and offered me an incredible deal to buy one. 2011 Toyota Camry, with 16k miles, in basically perfect condition. Comps in the area go for somewhere between 15k-19k. Price they wanted was 10k (gave me a decent deal off off the KBB value, which is more of an arbitrary starting point than an actual value). Being an investment minded guy, I took this deal. I intend to do some repairs to my current car and use this as my commuter for a while until I sell it and try to go car-less.
Cash: about 11.5k
Investments: right around 11k
Vehicles: 17k+.
NW: 39.5k

i feel pretty good about this right now. Playing ERE on easy mode, so even with my ridiculous spending (which I-- as always-- need to work on) I can save a lot of money.

December Spending:

Vehicle: $10,000 - explained above.

Festival Tickets: $665 . These are tickets to Electric Forest next Summer. It is something my SO has wanted to do for a really long time -- and now that she's graduating college and has a job offer, it seems like time to go. SO has said she will pay me back for half, but I don't care that much. It can be a present or something.

Pets: about $120. A little bit hard to track with my current system. $10 was definitely spent on cat litter, and about $10 more on cat food to extend my current supply. In other news, my sister is in charge of a no-kill shelter, and my SO has been fostering a puppy for about 3 months. This is much much longer than it usually takes to adopt younger dogs (2-3 weeks would be considered a long time), and that happened because he has a deformed growth plate in his leg causing it to grow crooked. Everyone who would see the puppy absolutely loved him, until they saw his broken leg. Then he was "broken" or "damaged goods" and nobody would want to adopt him. There were a couple close calls, but ultimately they just keep falling through. I would guess a lot of this came from the fact that his exposure for adoption is coming in a place where the people coming to adopt dogs generally don't want to spend a lot of money on a friend, or don't have the means to. Since my SO has a corporate job secured that is equivalent to mine in pay scale when she graduates from college, we decided to keep the puppy, at least until he is old enough to get his leg fixed so that others won't be afraid of adopting him. I got a new kennel for the pup and also a new leash (he chewed right through the first one, so this one is a new big horse lead). While in hindsight, buying the kennel new was probably not the smartest thing to do, we outfitted it with a big pad made from stuffing and fabric found at the local thrift store.

Car related spending: $294. This included gas, maintenance, and car parts that I have been generally needing to replace. This month I had to get a new battery for my car, Serpentine belt, alignment (annoyed I can't do this myself but it requires loads of specialist tools), wipers, and a couple other parts that I'm spacing.

Food: $223. About $80 of this spending was on eating out. Most of this was due to my SO and I's 5th anniversary of starting dating, so I wanted to go somewhere special to the both of us. We went to this little Ethiopian restaurant near us, run by an incredibly friendly Ethiopian immigrant. It always puts a smile on my face to visit her here, she makes everyone feel warm and welcome to be in her house/place of business. We spent several hours listening to stories about the beautiful art of Ethiopia, and I noticed how many of the patterns are built from fractals and beautiful I find them myself. I really wish that the Western world incorporated more fractal patterns in the things that we build, as I really find that they do make me happier than most of the art we have here. IMO it seems like the west lacks something cultural in this sense from all of the mechanization and capitalism that grew it. People simply live in a box, and then when they want to go somewhere else they get into a big expensive moving box and travel (in an isolated fashion) right to the other box where they are headed. There is no communication. There is no expectation of interacting with the world around us. It is like we try and distinctly separate ourselves from the world around, like we are something new and different and disconnected. But we aren't.

Gifts: $330. I'm not happy with this number, and I do not like the way that my family gives gifts these days. OTOH it is somewhat a price I pay socially to be a part of my community, and I cannot feel bad about this. I am unhappy that gifts these days are so impersonal and almost unwarranted. Money is taken to a vendor and exchanged for a thing, which you wrap up and give to the others as a form of giving or showing that you care. I think I will try to gravitate back to a much more personal type of gift giving... As a pretty decent chef and aspiring brewer, I will try to make presents more based on these skills that have care and time embedded within them.

Misc: $150. I need to look these over for issues, but this included phone + internet + other bills and personal stuff.

Grand Total: $11782
Actual Total: $1782
This is too high to be sustainable, but I do seem to be making some sort of progress here in normal spending, as I seem to have gotten it under $1k. I will again try to cut it back to reach much closer to ERE level sustainable budget.

Income: $4168
SR: 57% Eww. This is not good and needs to go up much more.

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Slevin
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Slevin »

Gilberto de Piento wrote:Welcome to the forum! You're definitely doing well in the savings department.
I don't know how I missed this for so long but thanks. I have a long ways to go, but playing on easy mode helps significantly. You can see that I'm not actually doing that well as I'm currently not paying rent, which helps extraordinarily. When I started back in Sept, I had some sort of internal agreement that this overspending in other places was bootstrapping me up to be able to lower it in the future, but I'm beginning to see that this is more and more untrue and is just useless spending. There is some small part of me that still want to BIFL on most things I buy, even when I know I shouldn't because it isn't somewhere where BIFL works. Take pants, for example. I fluctuated pants sizes (about 6" in waist) this year a lot due to bulking when lifting and then cutting it all back down when I learned a better way. I too often make mistakes in thinking I will want or need one thing. Hopefully I can improve this over time, however.

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Slevin
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Slevin »

I think my journal has been to impersonal so far, so I'm going to try and change it by including some long-winded thoughts by myself.

Personal thoughts: I don't want to buy anything anymore other than food and the occasional odd thing that I really want/need. I've become really disheartened with advertising these days, and the waste I create even when I just buy food from the supermarket. This makes me not want to buy replacement electronics at all, or basically anything I don't need. I'm seriously considering living in a van in the short term future, but it also makes me feel guilty thinking about all the fuel that I would use doing so. Right now it isn't any better living in a house, I just don't see the fuel that I burn directly. I'll have to do some basic calculations to see which is actually more energy efficient (in terms of fossil fuel usage).

I'll be really glad when the seasons change again and I can go back to obtaining most of my food from either the vendors at farmers markets who grow food locally, or my garden (if I can get one started this year I will be very excited). My rice + beans staples still come from the other side of the US, but it's hard to solve all your problems locally in suburbia. I'll continue to try to do what I can to taper off my fuel consumption here. I have started canning and fermenting vegetables in the hopes that by the time next winter rolls around, a lot of my veggie intake can be local products produced here in the growing season.

I'm starting to accumulate a decent amount of cash, and I'm starting to look into which ways I can invest... I'm basically ignorant still on this subject and I'm guessing it will still take me a couple of months before I decide on the "correct" way to do it. Right now, my 401k is sitting in indexes. Seeing as the choices I have from my company are between low-cost indexes with average performance or higher cost mutual funds with about the same performance, I'm not sure why I would choose to go with the latter. Right now it looks like I'm sitting with the stocks in 60/40 large cap/mid-small cap. Is this a bad idea? The 10% fluctuations in (temporary)price do not annoy me much, as the money in my 401k feels very imaginary to me.

For the money I invest outside my 401k, I can see a lot of viable investing strategies. I just need to decide on one that is right for me... Index investing is definitely the easy way out, but (as many of the people here have pointed out) it makes real valuation of companies nearly impossible and due to this it seems sort of like a "tulip mania" craze to me. It seems that if you say anything bad about the indexes everyone yells a line about "market averages" or "MMM says its best" with no arguments against the issues raised and continues trading their indexes.

Dividend growth investing also looks promising. @spoonman and several others here seem to have taken it to a successful ERE, and it seems to me like a viable option here. DGI's provide payoffs that increase greater than inflation over the years, and as long as you make enough mediocre evaluations and sell stocks which are not achieving their growth rates for several quarters, it looks like it is possible to have a steady cash flow from this type of investing without too many hiccups. Downsides are price drops when DG starts falling off from companies, which can lead to lower dividends from the stocks. Too many of these and your portfolio can start hurting.

NNT talks about some sort of barbell monstrosity that I haven't looked into the details of too heavily, but from the principle it seems like you place most of your money into very safe returns, and then put a small percentage into random long shot companies (that could make it really really big) (nonlinear payoffs). Based on the principles form the book this could be a very viable source of investing, but I really don't have a huge background in it, and I haven't seen anyone around here use this method successfully. It also seems to play very much off of randomness, so I'm not sure this method provides a clear FI horizon to shoot for. If anyone can point out more details about where to read up on this strategy (without all of the crazy jargon we see in NNT's first book) I would be very thankful. For now I'll try and go look into Taleb's papers in the short term.

Then there are plenty of other stock selling methods which I need to look into before I make a choice of what to do... hopefully I do not sit in the Analysis Paralysis stage of this game for too long!

There's still some weird stigma in my brain about becoming FI and FI in general. I long ago decided that it is a tact I've been wanting to take, but it all still feels weird and imaginary to me. Like I am planning some big heist to steal a treasure. The planning will take years, and everything has to align just perfectly for it to work. And there is a chance that some day I will just wake up and get caught, being forced to serve out the rest of my days as a wage-slave.

Tyler9000
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Tyler9000 »

I relate to your comment about products, minimalism, and advertising. Most of my career was spent in consumer product design and I used to find it very motivating, but after experiencing the product treadmill first-hand for many years I've taken a similar turn towards rejecting many of those same things. There's nothing wrong with that, but my one piece of advice is not to let guilt drive your decisions. Don't deny yourself luxuries -- just prioritize the ones that actually add happiness over ones that do not. IMHO, your goal should not be to have a minimal life but a sustainably happy one.

Regarding investing, you can also cross-pollinate some of those methods. For example, your description of Taleb's recommendation reminds me of Larry Swedroe's indexing method -- select the highest returning stock indices and balance them with high percentages of more stable bonds.

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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by jacob »

One of my very first inroads into all of this was http://www.verdant.net/ and for several years (2001-2008), I was quite the fanatic when it came to not-buying things other-than-food. I've mellowed out somewhat since then. However, I still think those sentiments were helpful in getting to my current low spending in a sink or swim fashion. Essentially I felt justified in going cold turkey on consumerism before acquiring the skills to get more bang for the buck in other ways. In between, I've acquired more stuff, but once you have would you need, the only thing you should be buying is food or whenever something you use wears out. Anything else is most like a form of consumerism.

The barbell strategy (not to be confused with the fixed income strategy with the same name) is more of a risk-control strategy for an informed investment strategy. You put 95% of your assets in ultra-safe classes and speculate on the remaining 5%. You now have 20 chances to be wrong. This means that you really have to watch that 5% and generally know what you're doing. You're looking for ten-baggers in that 5% because it has to pull the entire rest of the portfolio. That might sound "risky" but realize that your maximum downside is only ever 5% which is a lot less than practically any other method. There's an old investment classic from the 50-60s that discussed it in detail. I forget the title/author ... George something ... maybe. It's not a beginner's strategy for sure---because you need those ten-baggers. It is an extremely robust form of risk control though. You'd likely sleep really well at night. Obviously the dastard 4%-rule doesn't hold here.

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Slevin
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Slevin »

@tyler9000 , The Fat tails indexing method is quite interesting... it seems to have a lot of potential. On the other hand, that Golden Butterfly portfolio looks beautiful based on the past data... I just wonder if it is a current optimization? Which we can't really know. Every time I make it over onto your site I just get intrigued by all of the interesting ideas people have.

On the topic of the consumer product design, I have just gotten opportunity to do some of that at my current job, for interesting science stuff. However every time I look at it I just see the problems/wastefulness of it all. I want to participate in it because of all of the potential upside and opportunities it could provide, but it still feels bad. I'm currently starting to read Survival+, so I hope it offers me some hope there.

@Jacob thanks for the intro to the barbell method. I'll look into it further, but as it isn't much of a beginner method, I may start with something lazy from Tyler's portfolios while playing around and learning more about investing. On the ecological topic, a lot of the stuff I have been recommended from this site makes the world we live in seem very strange indeed. From your book you talk about it as Plato's Allegory of the Cave and I would agree with that diagnosis. Its really really strange being outside of the cave but only being able to interact (in real life anyways) with those still trapped. I have to interact with these people all of the time, but they all seem so obsessed with the fanciest new tech and mainstream media. The Wheaton levels just keep separating us more and more, and its hard for me to have the perspective to understand their values. Some of this is also probably my social ignorance.

I happened upon Verdant a while back when I read all the recycled posts on the main site fairly often. It was an eye opener (Along with Overshoot, and a lot of extraneous articles on fossil fuel use and sustainable alternatives). Overall I'm glad that you guys opened my eyes to all of these things. I think I just need to have a nice sit down and remember the point of "How I found Freedom": don't worry about the things you can't control. Worry about the ones you can.

Did
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Did »

@OP New to journal but am enjoying it. One question, how did you get lumped with a cat? I've been reading up on how they infect humans (serious) with brain cysts to make them more fond of cats, and it freaks me out. I see a lot of bizzare cat owners in my housesitting (really pet sitting) capacity. They can't see their own filth and I blame the cysts.

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Slevin
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Slevin »

@Did, Hmm... You seem to be pretty biased here! I would say that I am actually a pretty clean person just due to the fact I am somewhat of a minimalist. Even if I had all of my stuff out, it wouldn't be too messy in here. On the subject of cats I will initially warn you not to believe everything you read on the internet (even if it has to do with science papers). Just remember that many of the scientific papers we see published might still be incorrect due to a myriad of causes. I'm still skeptical about the research you seem to be quoting here, though I believe it is possibly true.

How I got lumped in with my cat though is a different story though. Back in my early college days one of my roommates had a cat. The cat was super friendly, nice, and liked to snuggle. After a while of being around cats, I ended up liking them much more than I did before (maybe I got some cysts right then :P) . At one point I happened upon a friend of a friend who had a litter of Savannah Cats and gave me one for something like $20, and so I have had a cat since. She is a very loud little purball at around 6-7 lbs, and really pretty. Since I have gotten out of college and moved into the work world I have started to consider trying to find her a new home, however, as I am usually gone for 12+ hours a day and sleep another 7-8. Fear and a rather large amount of guilt (along with liking some company) have somewhat held me back from re-homing her her so far. We will see what happens in the future. Due to the incredible demand (read $$$$) for these cats I could probably find a good new home in a couple of days or less.

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Slevin
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Slevin »

Somehow I missed the whole month of January here, so I'm going to catch up quickly there...

Quick lifestyle notes: at this point I have turned my diet entirely vegetarian. To me it wasn't difficult as I have mostly moved away from eating meat anyways. My main sources of protein are now quinoa, lentils, eggs, and some cheese here and there. From a health perspective I have not noticed a big change from the past couple of months. I still am losing fat like I have been for the past six months or so (since I have switched to eating whole foods). Starting to get kind of skinny (6'2" 175 lbs). I generally choose to fast for a large part of the day, and I haven't quite locked down how to eat more calories than I consume due to weight lifting. i should probably consume far more peanut butter than I do currently, but it makes me gag unless I turn it into a sauce of some sort. I am contemplating to moving fully vegan from a mix of an ethical and energy perspective... but I've got to learn to walk before I run.

January Costs:
Total spending: $766.17
Income: $3639
Savings rate: ~79%

Shopping: $218. More than half of this was a 24kg kettlebell, which set me back about $120. In hindsight, this was not the best purchase because I am still not strong enough to do getups with this guy :lol:. I will somewhat blame the weightloss, but there also was a lot of overconfidence. The jump from 16kg to 24kg is pretty big, much bigger than I anticipated. However I would still really like to make it to the 24kg kettlebell in the near future, as increase in weight gives nonlinear effects.

Food and Dining: $254. More than half of this was eating out. I ended up spending a lot of time out with friends and the girlfriend, and grabbed 5 or 6 meals for me + whoever else was there. No serious regrets here.

Auto and Transport: $205.08. About $100 of that is car insurance, the rest is car parts for my second vehicle I am fixing up and will hopefully sell in the near future.

Pets: $52.60 . Most of this was cat food (dry mix for wet cat food). I should be set for a good while on this front.

Misc: $35 .Erm... Not sure what most of this is. $20 is cell phone bill, don't know what the other $15 was.

This spending is slightly high, but only about $400 of this is real, repeatable and necessary spending.

February is looking very dreary from a financial perspective due to some huge bills being dropped (medical charges, taxes on the vehicle I bought at the end of the year, and 6 months of car insurance), but I'm still hoping to get a 50%+ savings rate.

Hmm... Oh yes. If anyone cares/was keeping up with my job offer/situation deal, I have kept my old job. Didn't bring other offer up or anything like that during review. Pay got bumped up 5% and apparently my boss is trying pretty hard to get me a promotion, which should bump it up more than that again. It will be interesting to see what happens over the next couple of years.

Other interesting things of note: Started some mead back in early January. A couple of weeks ago it developed a bit of a funky film on top. I cleared it off and let things start going again. Last week i taste tested it one night before going to bed. Woke up the next morning with lymph nodes swollen to a very painful amount. Now I may have thought this might have been the cause, but I also had a sick roommate with a cold, and I had just gotten back from visiting my girlfriend who also had a cold. So I wasn't sure what the cause was. Fast forward to this week: I tried a taste of the mead again last night. Woke up with the same nasty symptoms this morning. Time to throw out that batch, scrub the hell out of my receptacle, and try again. I'm sad because the mead was incredibly tasty, and this mess cost me a decent amount of brewing time and $8 in delicious local honey. I'm gonna start my new batch this Sunday.

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jennypenny
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by jennypenny »

What can go wrong with the mead that it would make you sick?

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Slevin
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Slevin »

@jennypenny I really have no idea! After digging for hours, I found it sort of looks like this which may or may not be bad. I'm still not sure if the mead is good or bad. I'm just not willing to sicken myself again to try it. To be fair though... I'm not yet unsick from the last time I tried it. Will taste again and see about my throat in the morning. Third time is the charm, right :lol: ?

FBeyer
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by FBeyer »

Slevin wrote:.... Will taste again and see about my throat in the morning. Third time is the charm, right :lol: ?
Mandatory
https://xkcd.com/242/

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Slevin
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Re: Slevin's journal

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@FBeyer, it was no worse, not better. I really don't know what is going on... I do seem to be getting sicker though. The sore throat bit hasn't gone away, so I may have to go see a doctor eventually :oops: .

February update:

Sold one of my two cars! now I'm down to just one (which is still one more than I would like to own, but it is still $4.4k+ in the green for now).

Savings rate for February:
Income: $5390 ($3530 no including car sale)
Expenses: $1880. Disgustingly high for me, but this is filled with $1300 in non-normal bills.

Nominal savings % - 65%
Actual savings % - 47% - Under 50% savings rate makes me incredibly sad. If I count the car taxes as investment costs, which I assume they are, savings jumps to around 66% which is acceptable.

Auto: $1206 - 650 went to taxes on new vehicle, roughly 540 to 6 months of car insurance. 20 dollars or so on gasoline. This is the bulk of my expenses, which I am totally okay with,

Doctor visit: $215 - had a nasty looking mole removed. Apparently it was nothing to worry about and just turned a funky color due to muscle growth and blood vessel growth (I think?). Paying $215 for a 15 minute appointment including someone slicing off a mole with a razor blade seems a little ridiculous to me...

Food: $252 - $100 of this was alcohol, and another $50 was eating out. I feel pretty accomplished here this month.

Shopping: $111 - Needed a new belt, some boxer shorts, and a capo (trying to pick up playing the guitar)

Gifts: $44 - Relatives' birthday.

Pet stuff: $20 - mostly dog toys here.

Normal spending: $1015. Evening out auto insurance over the 6 months would have dropped it to $565. That would be on par with Jacob level spending :P . But I'm really kidding myself here. March can be a true measure of whether I can actually nail this kind of spending down.

Interestingly enough the more I drop down in my expenses the happier I become. Removing choice (to an extent) also leads to more happiness. I now fantasize about owning 4 or 5 of the same shirt, a few pairs of identical pants (I do this already), and just taking the choice out of the equation all of the time. It would really confuse my peers at work though :D . Of course my current shirts are perfectly good and should stay that way for years, so we will see if 5-10 years from now me still has the same ideas. I certainly hope he doesn't!

I'm still having some difficulty in dropping down my food cost below $200, but my alcohol costs and eating out are actually now more than my groceries. We will see how long I can justify this, but the social aspect is much more important to me than the extra $100 or so per month. When I end up living in the same city as my SO I will see if this cost starts dropping more.

On the interesting stuff side of my life, I just finished up reading Charles Hugh Smith's "A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for all". It was a delightful read which talked about how the top down monetary creation system has systemic consequences that drive inequality between the wealthy and the rest of us. It then comes up with a decentralized system which creates wealth from the bottom up (read: the poor and working class) based on the collective needs of self forming groups to change the value system of the world we live in. This would again drive the economy to focus on other things than profit maximization. It would drive the currently dead community sector of the economy which would promote needs like sustainability, elder care, using the appropriate types of technology, etc. I would highly recommend picking a copy of the book up if you can (it is free on a month long Kindle Unlimited trial).

Over the past weekend I experimented with just turning off all of my electronic devices (cell phone, internet) and it was beautiful. I met a bunch of strangers, played board games, went Frisbee golfing multiple times, and spent a lot of time outside. It showed me that I should really try to limit my screen time per day when I am not working. I'll have to work on this for the future.

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Slevin
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Re: Slevin's journal

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<redacted>
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NickHalden
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by NickHalden »

Slevin wrote:hmm... I'm not sure if this is a place to post this or not but I have been having a very rough month. My girlfriend of 5.5 years and I spiraled downward and finally broke down due to what turned out to be a deep co-dependency from both of us. I'm currently trying to look at the pieces and figure out which bits are me and what aren't. Its really hard but I think I'm okay now and I'm getting professional help... It really hurts to see what you thought was going to be your future and your entire identity crumble into nothingness... But I understand now that is why we need boundaries and a sense of self in our relationships. You live, you learn, right :lol: ?

I'll try and get this journal back up to date when I get myself back together...
Hi Slevin,

Doesnt hurt to post it here. I dont know you but I can only imagine what that must feel like (being in a relationship for nearly 10 years myself). My thoughts are with you. Keep it up.

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Slevin
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Re: Slevin's journal

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<redacted>
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